Recently, NASA moved the Space Shuttle Endeavour to Launch Pad 39Aa in preparation for an August 7 launch. Upon its arrival at the pad, officials welcomed it with a very large banner which read "Go Endeavor!"
There's only one problem. The name had been misspelled, leaving out the "u."
Endeavour, the last addition to the orbiter fleet, is named after the first ship commanded by James Cook, the 18th century British explorer, navigator and astronomer. On the original Endeavour's maiden voyage in August 1768, Cook sailed to the South Pacific (to observe and record the infrequent event of the planet Venus passing between the Earth and the sun). Determining the transit of Venus enabled early astronomers to find the distance of the sun from the Earth, which then could be used as a unit of measurement in calculating the parameters of the universe.
The misspelled banner was only in place a little more than an hour before the misspelling was noticed and the banner was replaced.
Image Credit:Eliot J. Schechter / Getty Images
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